2025: A Turning Point for Crypto - From Wild West to Enterprise Infrastructure

Source: Blockworks Original Title: 2025 Reflections Original Link: https://blockworks.co/news/blockworks-2025-reflections 2025 was a line in the sand moment for crypto.

Decades from now, we will look back at these years as 2009–2024. Then 2025. Then everything after.

The Shift

Until this point, crypto could fairly be categorized as “the Wild West” with all the good and bad that entails.

We’ve had a decade of unprecedented innovation in computer science, cryptography, and finance, leading to innovations like 24/7 markets, permissionless financial products, and zero-cost global dollar payments.

But throughout that same decade, frauds, speculation, and a lack of regulatory clarity damaged the optics of crypto and put a ceiling on the industry’s growth.

That all changed in 2025 with a major regulatory embrace of crypto. In a complete reversal, regulators went from fighting crypto to announcing support initiatives and pledging to bring financial infrastructure onchain.

We also got major positive crypto legislation. Several crypto companies went public. Stablecoins went mainstream. Prediction markets are the fastest growing product outside of AI. Billion-dollar M&A is finally happening. DEXs are eating market share from CEXs. Real-world assets (RWAs) grew 4x. The list goes on.

For the first time ever, banks, payments providers, startups, and enterprises have an incentive to build onchain.

The Internet Parallel

We believe we just experienced the equivalent of 2002 for the internet. The age of speculative capital driving crypto is over, and the slow grind up where innovations truly scale has only just begun.

The Next Decade: Real Businesses Moving Onchain

The theme of the last decade was “assets moving onchain.” $300B moved into stablecoins. $100B moved into DeFi. Another $50B flowed into perps and related markets.

Now, we’ve entered a new era.

We believe the theme of the next decade will be real businesses building onchain.

You can already see what it looks like. Startups generate hundreds of millions of revenue with just dozens of employees. Fintechs launched their own chains and stablecoins. Institutions like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan all transact on open, public blockchains.

The world is moving onchain. Slowly at first, then all at once.

In the next decade, we will go from $10 billion in onchain revenue today to more than $1 trillion.

Combined with AI, that shift onchain will create an explosion of opportunity and entirely new types of companies that have never existed before.

The Operating System for Onchain Business

The problem today: Even the most talented teams have to run multibillion-dollar protocols and onchain businesses on a patchwork of block explorers, internally built dashboards, and broken spreadsheets.

There is no single operating system and software platform for teams to run their business on.

The next phase is about turning data platforms into a true operating system for onchain businesses—running the core data and workflows for millions of onchain businesses.

2025 by the Numbers

Sales: ARR grew by more than 10x. Data and analytics ARR is now growing faster than any other line of business.

Profitability: Remained profitable, with positive net operating income and more cash on balance sheet than the start of the year.

Data Platform Scale: Data warehouse now contains more than 2.1 trillion rows of data flowing through 100+ pipelines that ingest data from 82 distinct sources. This data powers nearly 2,600 visualizations and 280 dashboards for 145 different companies.

Major Analytics Products: Launched Analytics 2.0 with custom data warehouse, frontend, and studio product, plus a dashboard builder, chart builder, and first version of API with 378 metrics available.

Expanded Data: Added offchain datasets for ETFs, fundraising, M&A, centralized exchanges, and more.

Token Transparency Framework: After presenting to regulators and receiving their support, introduced an open disclosure standard for crypto projects. Already being used to rate leading protocols with active discussions ongoing with exchanges, financial institutions, and data providers.

Podcasts: Podcast network is the most listened to network in crypto, reaching several million professionals and investors across finance, crypto, and tech.

Community: Built a community of 800,000+ followers across creators and brands.

Events: Hosted a major conference that was the first time a sitting US president addressed a crypto conference.

Looking Forward

Since starting in December 2017, the mission was simple: Build the best source of crypto insights and information for investors and professionals.

The story is one of a company that has survived multiple bear markets, stayed operational, and quietly compounded into something much more ambitious than ever believed possible.

As we head into 2026, conviction is stronger than ever that crypto will improve the world by broadening access to assets, increasing transparency, and reducing financial friction.